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Dagelijks archief 17 juli 2013

Palestinian teacher and activist Sireen Khudiri Sawafteh, 25, was released from Israeli occupation prisons on Monday, July 15, 2013, following two months’ imprisonment. She was released with a fine of 7000 NIS that is also serving as bail, but is prohibited from accessing the internet or leaving her home until another court hearing in her case on July 19.

She was arrested on May 15 as she returned to her home city of Tubas from university. She was held in Jalame detention centre for interrogation for 22 days before transfer first to Ashkelon and then to Hasharon prison with her fellow women political prisoners.

She said, following her release, that those who work on the prisoners’ cause should focus on Hasharon prison, as conditions are very bad, and medical neglect and mistreatment is common. She also urged support for Tahrir Mansour at her court hearing on August 28.

OTTAWA — Crucial evidence of Israel’s suspected nuclear weapons program was discovered by Canada in 1964, sending shivers through Washington, Ottawa and London, according to newly-surfaced U.S. and British national archives’ papers.

A spring 1964 Canadian intelligence report revealed Argentina had secretly agreed to supply Israel with at least 80 tons of uranium oxide “yellowcake” to fabricate fuel for a mysterious nuclear reactor Israel was constructing with French assistance near the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert.

Spent, or irradiated, reactor fuel can be reprocessed to harvest plutonium for making nuclear weapons and, since 1960, the U.S. and its allies conjectured Israel was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

But the eye-opening Canadian report, which the U.S. initially doubted, confirmed fears that Israel was ambitiously seeking a secret uranium supply, under which there would be no international safeguards to ensure the yellowcake was used for peaceful purposes.

Forty-three previously secret U.S. and British government archival documents related to the Israeli yellowcake file recently surfaced and have now been published by the U.S. National Security Archives in concert with two nuclear non-proliferation organizations.

At the time, the Canadian intelligence report was supported by additional evidence gathered by Ottawa: local defence scientist Jacob Koop, a career intelligence analyst at the Defence Research Board, prepared a detailed and highly impressive analysis of Dimona’s military potential. Koop concluded Israel had all of the “prerequisites for commencing a modest nuclear weapons development project.”

The two Canadian assessments markedly stoked western anxieties that an Israeli bomb could destabilize the Middle East and inflame Cold War hostilities with the Soviet Union.

“These nearly unknown documents shed light on one of the most obscure aspects of Israel’s nuclear history — how secretly and vigorously Israel sought raw materials for its nuclear program and how persistently it tried to cultivate relations with certain nuclear suppliers,” William Burr, of the National Security Archive, and Avner Cohen, of the James Martin Centre for Non-proliferation Studies, write in an online introduction to the archival find. (The pair also authored a July 1 expose in Foreign Affairs magazine.)

“The story of the Argentine yellowcake sale to Israel has remained largely unknown in part because Israel has gone to great lengths to keep tight secrecy to this day about how and where it acquired raw materials for its nuclear program.”

That Argentina made the yellowcake sale to Israel has already been disclosed in declassified U.S. intelligence estimates. “But how and when Washington learned about the sale and how it reacted to it” can now be credited to Canadian intelligence officers, they write.

“The Canadian government was interested in the Israeli nuclear program from its very inception. When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion met Prime Minister John Diefenbaker on May 25, 1961, Dimona was at the centre of the discussion … (and) Ben-Gurion pledged that the Dimona project was peaceful.”

But, “closely monitoring Israeli nuclear activities, Canadian intelligence discovered the yellowcake sale sometime in the spring of 1964 and soon shared this sensitive information with the British.”

The intelligence was that Argentina had secretly negotiated a long-term contract in late 1963 to provide 80 to 100 tons of yellowcake to Israel. Argentina later confirmed the deal, though the Israelis remained evasive. (Israel still does not acknowledge the existence of a nuclear weapons program.)

British Foreign Office official Alan Goodison, after receiving the Canadian information, calculated that the Israelis could produce a nuclear bomb by the summer of 1965. “Their anxiety to obtain such a large quantity of safeguard-free uranium suggests … sinister motives,” he wrote in a memo.

Publicly, however, the U.S., Canada and Britain remained silent. “The United States has always been ambivalent about Israel’s nuclear program, and exposing what it knew or suspected about the Israeli nuclear program could have caused the United States serious diplomatic problems with Israel’s Arab neighbours and possibly the Soviet Union,” Burr and Cohen write in Foreign Policy.

The source who gave Canadian intelligence details of the yellowcake deal has never been revealed, nor has the identity of the department or agency involved.

Koop, whose insightful analysis was commended by Canadian and British officials, died in Ottawa in July 2009 at the age of 86.

Malala Yousafzai stands next to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (R) before giving her first speech since the Taliban in Pakistan tried to kill her for advocating education for girls, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, July 12, 2013.

A Taliban commander has written to Pakistani girl activist Malala Yousafzai, saying he regretted her shooting last year by militants and urging her to come home.

Yousafzai, now 16, was shot at close range by Taliban gunmen in October as she left school in Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan. She was flown to Britain for treatment and has not returned since due to persistent Taliban threats against her.

On July 12, she addressed the world in an electrifying speech at the United Nations in which she said the pen was mightier than the sword.

In a fiery, densely written letter packed with references to philosophers and politicians, commander Adnan Rasheed said he wished he could have told her to “refrain from anti-Taliban activities” to prevent the attack.

“My all emotions were brotherly for you because we belong to same Yousafzai tribe,” he wrote in the English-language letter dated July 15 and confirmed as authentic by the Taliban.

“When you were attacked it was shocking for me. I wished it would never happened and I had advised you before.”

“At the end I advise you to come back home,” Rasheed wrote, adding that she should join a female Islamic school and “use your pen for Islam.”

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt on Yousafzai. Two of her classmates were also wounded.

She was treated in Pakistan before the United Arab Emirates provided an air ambulance to fly her to Britain, where doctors mended parts of her skull with a titanium plate.

Rasheed, a former Pakistan Air Force officer once jailed for trying to assassinate General Pervez Musharraf, denied the Taliban had attacked her because of her campaign against Taliban efforts to deny girls education.

“Please mind that Taliban or Mujahideen are not against the education of any men or women or girl,” he wrote in his letter, which reads like a lecture to Malala.

“Taliban believe that you were intentionally writing against them and running a smearing campaign to malign their efforts to establish Islamic system in Swat and your writings were provocative.”

In the four-page letter, he goes on to accuse the West of imposing its standards on other nations and attacks figures including U.S. President Barack Obama and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as well as the English and Jews.

AMMAN, July 17, 2013 (WAFA) – President Mahmoud Abbas held a late night hours-long meeting on Tuesday with United States Secretary of State John Kerry in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and discussed all issues that can contribute to the creation of the right atmosphere for the resumption of negotiations.

Presidency spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh told WAFA that Abbas stressed the Palestinian and Arab firm position regarding the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Meanwhile, Kerry affirmed the US President Barack Obama’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the two-state solution.

The Palestinian Information Centre reported on the statement of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, holding the Israeli prison authority fully responsible for what happened to Palestinian prisoner Mohamed Ghawadreh who lost his eyesight partially after he received incorrect medical treatment in the infirmary of Hadarim jail.

The society stated on July 16 that Ghawadreh was suffering from severe pains in his teeth, but an Israeli doctor in Hadarim jail deliberately injected him with an incorrect drug, which to date has caused him to lose 80 percent of his vision in one eye and 30 percent in the other.

It affirmed that his family is prevented from visiting him in jail and appealed to the Red Cross to pressure the Israeli prison authority in this regard in order for the prisoner to see his family.

The prisoner society also called for forming a neutral medical and human rights committee to investigate the incident that led the prisoner to lose his vision partially.

At the same time, on July 17, Palestinian lawyer Hanan al-Khatib reported that prisoners in Ramle prison clinic refused meals and medications to protest ongoing medical negligence and mistreatment.

Riad Amour, a representative of the ill prisoners, said that prison authorities have threatened the prisoners with a loss of family visits and further penalties for their strike. He reported that the patients are seen by a doctor only once weekly, despite their serious conditions, and are denied important medical treatment, including for inflammation after amputations, shrapnel injuries, and tumors.

Abdullah Barghouthi is now suffering from atrophy of the liver as a result of his inability to burn body fat, reported Palestinian lawyer Hanan al-Khatib. Barghouti, and four other Palestinian prisoners holding Jordanian citizenship, Mohammad Rimawi, Muneer Mar’i, Alaa Hammad and Hamza Othman al-Dabbas, have been on hunger strike for 77 days.

Barghouthi is being held in Afula hospital, while the other four strikers are now being held in a psychiatric ward at Ramleh prison clinic. He has suffered inflammation of the heart and liver over the past week and has fainted on several occasions. Khatib said that a prison medical committee is threatening to force feed Barghouthi.

Sir Ronald Cohen is not exactly crowing, but he must have felt a moment of personal satisfaction at the World Economic Forum in Jordan in May.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, had just announced a US$4 billion plan to kick-start Israel-Palestinian Territories peace talks.

“We need an understanding of the role economics can play in the peace process,” said Mr Kerry.

Sir Ronald, who was at the Forum that day, can claim to have been arguing exactly that since 2003 when, after a career at the pinnacle of the global venture capital business, he formed the Portland Trust, a British non-profit “action tank” to promote peace and stability in the Palestinian Territories through economic development.

“It was set up to work on the economic dimension of the peace process. We realised we couldn’t just work on one side, so it had to look at both Israel and Palestine, with different strategies for each.”

In Jordan, apart from Mr Kerry’s initiative, there was another example of a strategy towards peace in a business framework with the “breaking the impasse” plan, aimed at getting Israeli and Arab business leaders in the region working together. Sir Ronald was involved in that from its inception.

“There has to be a vision of a more prosperous future. We must stop looking backward at the causes of conflict, and try to see what the future might hold,” he says.

You might think those are the easy words of a wealthy philanthropist, but Sir Ronald has direct experience of the suffering and dislocation conflict can cause in the Middle East.

Born in Egypt, as a teenager in 1957 he and his family became penniless refugees from their home in Cairo after the Suez conflict, settling in London because of his mother’s British nationality.

Education at Oxford and Harvard was followed by a stint at the management consultant McKinsey, which he left to start Apax Partners, one of the first venture capital firms in Britain.

Apax grew to become one of the world’s biggest and most successful firms, arranging start-up or buy-out finance for some of the biggest deals for 30 up-and-down years of the corporate cycle, and for some of the most successful start-ups in history – Virgin, Apple and AOL among them. Sir Ronald became a multimillionaire.

But after three decades with traditional private equity and venture capital work at Apax, he became more focused on a new concept: social investment, which he defines as “a financial investment designed to achieve a social improvement.

It marks a change from “philanthropic giving to philanthropic investing”. He advised the UK government on how to organise a policy for social investment, then headed the Commission on Unclaimed Assets, which sought to use the hundreds of millions of pounds in dormant bank accounts for public investment purposes.

His plans have had significant beneficial outcomes in local projects to reduce prisoner recidivism, tackle homelessness and illiteracy.

Most recently he was the chairman of Big Society Capital, the United Kingdom’s first social investment bank.

Meanwhile, the Portland Trust was becoming increasingly active in the Palestinian Territories, designing and implementing plans in the economic infrastructure, such as affordable housing and alternative energy schemes, as well as the financial infrastructure of the West Bank – micro-finance, loan guarantees and other credit facilities.

So what does he think of Mr Kerry’s $4bn initiative? “It’s intended to develop the Palestinian economy but as yet there are no details on where the money is coming from and where it will be invested, as far as I am aware. But there has to be progress towards peace for it to work. The US is not going to pump $4bn if there is no progress towards peace,” he says.

Of the “breaking the impasse” initiative, in which 300 Arab and Israeli business people pledged to work together to relaunch the peace process, he says: “Business has shown it is able to play a role in conflict resolution, in South Africa and Northern Ireland.

“In those situations, contacts between political representatives were often not acceptable, but business connections are.

“There are now constant meetings between the two sides, in rather more informal meetings.

The challenge in these kind of situations is you often cannot achieve too much if it’s all in the open. It’s much better if these things go on behind the scenes.”

The Portland Trust is working on an assessment of the Palestinian economy, with the help of McKinsey, which aims to show there is scope for the kind of high growth, low unemployment conditions highlighted by Mr Kerry.

“It will show Israeli and West Bank politicians have many common interests in the economy of the region.

“We also want to encourage greater momentum to economic and political efforts by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League,” he says.

Will these plans – by Mr Kerry, Israeli and Arab businessmen and the Portland Trust – get the level of political support necessary to be effective? “There has to be political buy-in,” he says.